When William Came eBook

“Look here, Murrey,” said Cicely, “after
we’ve had dinner together to-night, I’m
going to do a seemingly unwifely thing. I’m
going to go out and leave you alone with an old friend.
Doctor Holham is coming in to drink coffee and smoke
with you. I arranged this because I knew it was
what you would like. Men can talk these things
over best by themselves, and Holham can tell you everything
that happened—­since you went away.
It will be a dreary story, I’m afraid, but
you will want to hear it all. It was a nightmare
time, but now one sees it in a calmer perspective.”

“I feel in a nightmare still,” said Yeovil.

“We all felt like that,” said Cicely,
rather with the air of an elder person who tells a
child that it will understand things better when it
grows up; “time is always something of a narcotic
you know. Things seem absolutely unbearable,
and then bit by bit we find out that we are bearing
them. And now, dear, I’ll fill up your
notification paper and leave you to superintend your
unpacking. Robert will give you any help you
want.”

“What is the notification paper?” asked
Yeovil.

“Oh, a stupid form to be filled up when any
one arrives, to say where they come from, and their
business and nationality and religion, and all that
sort of thing. We’re rather more bureaucratic
than we used to be, you know.”

Yeovil said nothing, but into the sallow greyness
of his face there crept a dark flush, that faded presently
and left his colour more grey and bloodless than before.

The journey seemed suddenly to have recommenced; he
was under his own roof, his servants were waiting
on him, his familiar possessions were in evidence
around him, but the sense of being at home had vanished.
It was as though he had arrived at some wayside hotel,
and been asked to register his name and status and
destination. Other things of disgust and irritation
he had foreseen in the London he was coming to—­the
alterations on stamps and coinage, the intrusive Teuton
element, the alien uniforms cropping up everywhere,
the new orientation of social life; such things he
was prepared for, but this personal evidence of his
subject state came on him unawares, at a moment when
he had, so to speak, laid his armour aside.
Cicely spoke lightly of the hateful formality that
had been forced on them; would he, too, come to regard
things in the same acquiescent spirit?

CHAPTER III: “THE METSKIE TSAR”

“I was in the early stages of my fever when
I got the first inkling of what was going on,”
said Yeovil to the doctor, as they sat over their
coffee in a recess of the big smoking-room; “just
able to potter about a bit in the daytime, fighting
against depression and inertia, feverish as evening
came on, and delirious in the night. My game
tracker and my attendant were both Buriats, and spoke
very little Russian, and that was the only language